Tornado
by Kellatrixx
Summary: Cid recalls the day he left home, the day he left everything behind. Contains Valenwind.


Mrs. Highwind was allergic to the dandelions that spread like an overgrown carpet in the backyard, twisting up the pickets of the fence and blowing their spores all about whenever there was a breeze. This made it the perfect place for a fifteen-year-old to hide, if he was careful to wiggle himself down flat against the dusty ground and let the blanket of bright yellow and white weeds cover him. But as long as he could still see the sky, Cid didn't care what sort of dirt got on his clothes, or how many bugs he found in his shirt later, or how much his eyes burned when he stepped back into the dark inside, after staring at the brightness of the sunlit clouds for hours. The cage he lived in was small, and the rest of the Highwind family tightened the lock every day.

Cid twisted a yellow flower around roughly in his hand, already bigger than a teenager's ordinarily would have been. He sure as hell wasn't as tall as some of the other boys in his class, but he was stocky and strong; a shoe-in for SOLDIER, or so his father proclaimed almost daily. Cid crushed the dandelion in his fist. The liquid that leaked from the flower and stem made his palm sticky.

He let his eyes wander upwards, following the bright white plume to the flank of the aircraft that produced it, and thought of the catalog of aviation careers his teacher had given him in third grade after seeing the doodles of space ships splayed across his homework. "I don't see many boys as smart as you," he'd said, wagging a finger too close to Cid's nose. "You'd better use those brains of yours. Don't let them go to waste. If you wanna be up in the air, you get up there, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise." The catalog was full of flight schools, all of the careers that stemmed from them, and interviews with pilots and astronauts. It was amazing, Cid thought, even then, lying in the grass and flowers, how many things could happen in the cockpit of an aircraft.

"Cid!" The old hag was already calling for him. It wasn't even noon, and she was already blown up to her full height, apron tied around her gratuitous waist and blonde hair piled on top of her head in a messy cotton-candy bun. Cid tried to shrink into the foliage. "Cidney Highwind, you get out of that dirty grass and get back in the house. There was a storm warning on the radio, and they're sayin' it looks like another tornado! Do you wanna be blown away by the damn thing?"

"Yep," Cid muttered to himself. "That'd be great, actually. Thanks for the heads-up." To her, he said, "I'm comin', don't get your panties in a twist."

She threw him a barely-maternal scowl before returning to the house in a huff and slamming the screen door. Cid sat up blearily. Black, mean-looking clouds were already rolling in from the far south, close to Nibelheim, he guessed. The blue sky and sunlight above him wouldn't last much longer, and the vapor trail was breaking into misty puzzle pieces in midair. The storm was coming in fast, but he couldn't bring himself to open the door and return to the cage. The thought made him sick.

He had scaled the back steps and had the door handle wrapped in his fist before an annoyingly-familiar voice rose up from behind him, bright and excited.

"Hey Cid!"

"...What do you want?"

Cid didn't have a best friend; he hardly had the time or energy for one, but if he had to pick one, he supposed it would probably be her, even though she liked his company a hell of a lot more than he liked hers. He forced himself to turn around. Shera stood on the bottom step, her huge eyes watching him from behind her coke-bottle glasses and her little yellow peacoat hugged tight around her. Ordinarily her hair fell either in a free mane over her shoulders or in a tangled ponytail down her back. Where she'd come from, Cid still didn't know; she wasn't in his class because she was two grades below him, and she didn't seem to live anywhere nearby. She just had the tendency of showing up, mostly at inconvenient times.

"Didn't you hear about the tornado?" She blinked, as if expecting him to jump up in fear and thank her for the warning. Cid rolled his eyes, letting go of the door.

"This ain't the first tornado we've had here, and it ain't gonna be the last," he said gruffly.

"I've never seen one," she countered meekly.

"You ain't been livin' here very long, now have you?" he pointed out. "There've been tons of tornadoes 'round here." That was a slight exaggeration; Cid himself had only experienced one other, when he was seven or eight, and it hadn't been too bad. But for whatever reason, he felt like impressing somebody.

And sure enough, her eyes widened, nearly breaching the edges of her glasses. "There have? How many have you been in?"

"Oh, tons. Just tons," Cid lied. "It's good fun, spinnin' around like that. Time of my life." He watched as she took another step up toward him, fumbling with the buttons on her coat. He debated for a moment running inside and shutting the door in her face, but what little conscience he was willing to let out got the better of him.

"Come inside, will ya? It's gonna start getting bad soon." He opened the door and held it open as she followed him inside. She'd made herself at home in the Highwind house fairly quickly, and now she shuffled into the living room and plopped down on the couch like she lived there herself. Cid looked briefly around for his father before sitting next to her and turning on the radio. His mother had disappeared.

"Where're your parents?" she asked innocently.

"Around here somewhere," he muttered, trying his best to ignore her and listen to the slightly-garbled voices on the radio, straining his ears for news about Shinra's space program, but at the same time hoping he didn't hear anything about it. They had no idea what the fuck they were doing, that much was clear. He knew more about it than their best officer, and of that he was certain. Shera was fidgeting with her buttons again, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Cid looked to her, raising an eyebrow.

"Why are you-"

He never finished his sentence. The tall form of his father had taken up the doorway by the kitchen, slapping its hat on the counter and shrugging off its jacket. "Cid, you'll never guess where I just got back from," he drawled, sitting on one of the kitchen tables with a creak.

Cid sighed. "Where did you just get back from?" he asked dryly.

"Talkin' to a SOLDIER buddy of mine. Tellin' him all about you. He says they'll love you in the program. Hell, you're fifteen. You can shoot up that mako shit."

"I ain't joining SOLDIER. Like hell."

"Shut up. You dunno what's good for you."

"I think I do, alright?" Cid stood suddenly, producing a small sound of surprise from Shera. "I'm sick of this. I'm sick of living in this goddamn house. I'm sick of you. And I'm leaving."

"To do what?" he sneered at his son's exclamation. "Flight school? You wanna go to outer space? I'll tell you right now, Shinra's program is bullshit. No man's ever gonna make it up there without dying first, and if you're stupid enough to try, you ain't no son of mine."

Cid's shoulders shook slightly with anger; Shera watched as his face reddened and his fists clenched. Without another word, Cid jerked toward the hallway and all but sprinted to his room. Shera leaped up to follow him.

"Cid!"

He was already shoving things into a bag when she made it to the doorway, clothes and socks and some baubles she didn't recognize. On his bed next to the bag was a little magazine with the image of a plane stamped onto the front. She took it delicately and started turning the worn pages as Cid threw a book into the bag with a yell.

"Cid... you're not really leaving, are you?"

"Course I am. Who would stay in this fucking place?"

"I'm coming with you."

"Fuck no."

Shera stepped in front of him and drew herself up to her full height. "It's gonna take more than your dad and a tornado to stop me. I'm coming. We can go to Midgar, and I'll come with you to flight school."

He stared at her as if he'd strike her. Then, he closed the bag and tossed it at her. She caught it clumsily, giving him a questioning look. He sighed.

"If you take longer'n ten minutes getting your crap together, I'm leaving."

She dropped the bag, clapping her hands before bolting from the room.

"And that was the last time I saw my dad," Cid explained to Vincent. "Shera'n I went to flight school in Midgar, before we graduated. I managed to get myself into the space program, and they stationed us here in Rocket Town while they were building the Shinra no. 26. You know what happened from there." He sighed, a deep sound that gently blew Vincent's hair away from his shoulder. The two were lying on the sofa in the living room, Vincent's head on Cid's chest as the ex-Turk listened to the pilot's strong heart beat.

"He thought you were worthless," Vincent said. Cid couldn't tell whether or not it was an observation or a question.

"Yeah," Cid muttered. "Still haven't heard from him. I'm hoping someone's mentioned me on the radio, or something. So that he could hear it. That I made it up there, even if it wasn't on my terms..."

Vincent leaned up to give Cid a kiss. "I think that tornado may have been you," he said, amused.

"It sure as hell aughta been," Cid said with a laugh. "Makes sense, though. It never did come through."


End file.
